Customer Reviews

Hadrian and the Triumph of Rome

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(11)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Hadrian is an emperor who seems to slip through the cracks. Most people remember him as 'that guy who built the wall.' There aren't many biographies on the man and none of the ones that I know of are very good at revealing his personality. His best representation comes through fiction with the popular book Memoirs of Hadrian, so it's nice to see someone finally try to capture the man. Everitt's previous books on the Romans (Augustus: The Life of Rome's First Emperor and Cicero: The Life and Times of Rome's Greatest Politician) have been successful, and now he turns to the 2nd Century. A great deal of time is spent giving the background to Hadrian's rule. Hadrian doesn't even become emperor until 150 pages in. This wealth of background knowledge is something that I really appreciate in biographies. Too often they just become a dull chronicle of the facts. Everitt's stated goal is to 'make the unfamiliar familiar' and in that he succeeds. By the end you feel as if you understand Hadrian's distant world. If you liked Everitt's previous books then you'll probably like this one. If you haven't read them then I recommend you do. One point though; this book is not a scholarly biography. I don't believe that there are any major errors of fact, but the book is written with the intention of entertaining. If you want a book that only gives you the facts I'd recommend Hadrian: The Restless Emperor by Anthony Birley.

I loved Anthony' Everitt's Cicero: The Life and Times of Rome's Greatest Politician and Augustus: The Life of Rome's First Emperor and hoped he would work the same magic with Hadrian and the Triumph of Rome. However, I came away from this book with mixed feelings. Like many of the other reviewers on Amazon.com, I thought Hadrian and the Triumph of Rome was an entertaining history of the historical era slightly before and during Hadrian's reign. Everitt gives fascinating accounts of Roman hunting parties, Hadrian's villa at Tibur, and features of daily Roman life (including a fascinating discussion of Roman attitudes toward homosexuality). He also describes some of Hadrian's most important political and cultural decisions, including the fateful decision to permanently halt the expansion of the empire and his promotion of Greek culture.

However, Hadrian and the Triumph of Rome doesn't quite work as a biography. Too many times, Everitt is forced to qualify his narrative with assumptions or suppositions, while Hadrian himself is far in the background. I appreciate that Everitt warns his readers when he ventures off what is definitely known about Hadrian's life, but it becomes a bit too much. For example, Everitt tries to relate the life of Hadrian's Bythinian lover, Antinous, but all we seem to know for certain is that the two hunted together once and Hadrian grieved over his death. In other parts of the book, pages are taken up describing towns Hadrian might have visited or schools he might have attended, but then again might have skipped entirely.

This lack of certainty isn't Everitt's fault - although he is one of the most important emperors, Hadrian left behind a fleetingly small paper trail for historians (his memoirs are unfortunately lost to history. Still, I wonder if Everitt picked the right subject for a biography. One of the highlights of his previous books was seeing Cicero and Augustus as men and politicians, not merely statues. Everitt's book is probably as good a biography as we'll get, but Hadrian still seems like a statue and not a man. Perhaps he should have reworked the book into double-biography of Trajan and Hadrian.

Overall, the middle-empire is still far more unfamiliar to the modern public than the later republic or early empire, the subjects of Everitt's other two biographies. Hadrian and the Triumph of Rome is a great introduction to this period of the Roman Empire's glory days. However, don't be disappointed if you feel like Hadrian himself remains a distant figure.

I rather enjoyed Everitt`s two other Roman books Cicero, and Augustus. So I was fairly quick to pick up a copy of Hadrain. Everitt starts off with an introduction into the Roman world of Emperor Domitiaon, and later Trajan. I thought this was the best part of the book. The reader gets a great feel for the politics and general lifestyle the Romans had at that time. Hadrian is growing up during this period. He is learning the lessons of roman life. The military, the arts, Greek culture, Roman history, Hadrain seems to take it all in.
This book also has some great insights into leadership. Hadrain is a great observer of both current events and historical events. His political hero was the great Augustus. He takes many of Augustus`s policies, and makes them his own. He uses the lessons of his two military heroes, to whip a peace time military into shape. He also identifies the evils of Domitian, and how Trajan does such a better job of managing the different parts of government. But he also realizes Trajan is making a mistake by over extending the Empire. Soon after taking over power, Hadrian reverses Trajan`s policy of never ending conquest. This was not a popular decision, but Hadrain has the fortitude to go through with the policy. Hadrain almost always attempts to reach a peaceful agreement on political matters. However, he would use over whelming force if need be, to crush a rebellion.
Many of Hadrain`s policies are still being felt in the modern world. The border of France and Germany, and turning Judea into Palestine, are just two examples.
There was one weak area of the book. When Hadrian comes into power, he begins to travel all over the Empire. Everitt lists all sorts of building details. Everywhere Hadrain goes, he seems to build large monuments. I was left wondering how the Senate back in Rome felt about this. Where did all the huge sums of money come from? The political backroom details seem to be left out, of this part of the book.
Over all, there were some good insights into the Roman world of management, and not the Roman world of conquest. The Empire is at its peak. You can`t help but compare things to the era of Eisenhower and Kennedy. Things just could not be any better, and the decay has not yet started.

Despite all the claims of recent archeological evidence and exhaustive research, there is only so far one can understand - much less dig into - about Hadrian. This is particularly so given the inevitable comparison's to Everitt's other biographies of Julius Caesar and Cicero. Both Caesar and Cicero left enormous literary legacies that have survived thousands of years to today's biographers and historians. Little survives of Hadrian's literary creations but those poems and speeches inscribed on stone and bronze. As a result, Everitt had, comparatively, little to work with.

Thus, the excellence of Everitt's book on Hadrian truly does stand out. It is extremely impressive what Everitt was able to decipher and discern from analyzing the historical record, the fragments of Hadrian's surviving poems and speeches, and the opinions of later ancient biographers. Before reading the main text, I strongly recommend reviewing the first couple of pages toward the back of the book in the section "Sources" (p. 365 in the hardback); here Everitt briefly discusses the challenges he faced and his attempts to use the various hints and fragments to draw a reasonable portrait. It certainly made me realize what monumental challenge this was to write a biography about a man who has left his mark so indelibly on the world's landscape (Hadrian's Wall, Hadrian's Villa, etc.) but about whom we are left to guess so much.

The book had some fascinating discoveries for me, and I've loved reading about ancient Rome since I was a kid. I had no idea that Hadrian was also implementing a type of wall and series of fortifications (somewhat similar to Hadrian's Wall in the UK) in northern Africa to delineate the areas of northern Africa under direct Roman control versus those that were more client-states or tribal alliances. Makes complete sense in hindsight, given the UK wall, and makes me wonder if someday we will discover other wall / fortification fragments elsewhere around the Mediterranean world.

Four weaknesses of the book prevent me from giving it five stars:

1. Not a single one of the endnotes is marked within the text of the book so when you get to the whole "Notes" section in the back of the book, it's rather a waste; this also prevents you from looking up some of the additional comments Everitt makes about a particular point in the main text while you are reading the main text.

2. For all the talk throughout the book of what the empire controlled directly versus client states (Hadrian was very much into defining the extent of the direct influence / rule of Rome), there is no map that shows the area of direct rule versus various client states / alliances. This would have been enormously helpful to visualize the empire as Hadrian saw it.

3. Architectural drawings / blueprints of some of the more famous buildings - Hadrian's Villa, the Parthenon, etc. - would have been appreciated to go along with the discussions in the main text.

4. There was no real discussion of the legacy / impact of Hadrian. In my mind, this is the type of thing that a good biographer must at least attempt to tackle, and I missed this herein.

Those weaknesses aside, however (all four of which are relatively easily fixed in a second edition or paperback version), Everitt's biography of Hadrian is a very well written, well researched book that deserves to be read and kept by anyone interested in ancient Rome or Hadrian. I think it unlikely that we shall see another such good biography of Hadrian for years to come, and so this is a must have for anyone who loves to read about the ancient world.

The first 100 or so pages set the stage, with Hadrian appearing every now and then. I found the long introduction irritating in Everitt's Augustus: The Life of Rome's First Emperor since the back story is so familiar, but for Hadrian I appreciated it since I knew little of the post Claudius emperors.

For the next 2/3 of the book Everitt writes about Hadrian but also tells how difficult it is to know about him with so little surviving material. Everitt brings his impressive knowledge of the era to bear fillings with background on the time.

As general reader I learned a lot I didn't know, but I am also disappointed that this isn't a better book. Some of the fundamentals could be spelled out more clearly for amateurs like me. Missing information may be so routine that Everitt may presume it is widely known. One global example is that there is little description of how Hadrian managed the Empire (almost 2000 years before the virtual office) while traveling as long as for four years at a stretch. While Everitt says the elites of territories were somewhat autonomous there still had to be some central administrative core since the Emperor was not easily reachable. If dissatisfaction with him was great (Everitt has evidence that it was) Hadrian's absences had to be a large factor in his tenure; it is not so easy to hit a moving target and it is also not so easy to blame one. I expect that Everitt has the background to write an excellent chapter on this.

An example of a more specific gap is the absence of any source that alleges that an impostor voiced a command from the dying Trajan that Hadrian be adopted as his son. Everitt poses that the "butler" did it with some detail on why he might have, but doesn't give the source that suggests the impostor or the alleged involvement of the Empress. This contrasts with his recount the death of Antinous, Everitt quotes 3 sources that allege foul play.

There are a few phrases that jarred me and don't seem to fit book of this nature. The last one referring to the horrible death of the rabbi Aqipa on p. 302, "his messiah was unable to save him" may be the worst. I'd have given this 4 stars and not 3 were it not for this type of comment.

Because there is little on Hadrian, I recommend this for those interested in Roman history only. The author has a great background and despite the weaknesses cited above, he has assembled and interpreted a lot of material. If you are not interested in this period, this will not inspire you.

Anthony Everitt's "Hadrian and the Triumph of Rome" is a readable and accessible introduction to the politics of the Roman Empire at the end of the 1st and beginning of the 2nd Century A.D. Everitt's writing style attempts to walk the line between watering down history and inundating the reader with an overwhelming amount of information, and for the most part he succeeds in providing an engaging narrative that offers interesting insights to Hadrian and his times.

The main issue of contention is that much of the aforementioned narrative is overly speculative. While one appreciates Everitt's hesitancy to make confident assertions where the evidence is lacking, one begins to wonder why a book of this length was written if there's so little facts about Hadrian that can be stated with confidence. Perhaps a shorter book (this one is 432 pages) would have been more appropriate in light of the paucity of information.

A second issue of contention is a number of claims that the book makes, with regard to the Jews and Christians, that are simply untrue. Everitt refers to the Israelite Conquest of Canaan as "an early case of ethnic cleansing" (p.37), ignoring details from the Old Testament's own account that demonstrate that the purpose was one of dispossession of a specific geographic area of land from a superior military power. If ethnic cleansing was the goal then the story of the preservation of Rahab and her family makes no sense.

Everitt's credibility as a historian is further damaged when he claims that the Second Temple's Menorah's seven lamps represent the seven planets(p.39)--quite an odd claim for a historian to make since only five "wandering stars" were known in ancient times before the invention of the telescope (Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn) and even more odd to claim that the Jews used astronomical observations in the design of their Temple. On the same page he also states that the 12 loaves represented the Zodiac. Has Everitt never read the Old Testament or Jewish literature, which is unanimous in presenting the 12 loaves as representing the 12 tribes of Israel?

Everitt misrepresents Christians as well. On discussing Hadrian's pederastic inclinations, he states that "sex did not have the attributes of sin and guilt that Christians brought to it". (p.239). A more accurate statement would have been to specify that it was only sexual activity that occurred outside of the covenant of marriage between a husband and his wife was viewed as sinful. On p.279 he takes a statement from the Apostle Paul out of context to suggest that "Christians, too, disapproved of the procedure (of circumcision)"--a claim that is patently ridiculous in view of the fact that Jewish Christians continued to observe the rite of circumcision, while the early Church strenuously objected only to the teaching that uncircumcised Gentile converts should be required to undergo the procedure as well.

The above examples lead me to the crux of the main problem with "Hadrian and the Triumph of Rome": if Everitt makes fallacious statements like these, and gets these facts so obviously and painfully wrong, the reader must begin to wonder, "What else is presented as factual about Hadrian, that is in fact untrue?" In other words, these remarkable errors unfortunately undermine the trustworthiness of other information presented in the work. The portrait of Hadrian presented in the book may very well be accurate and true; but the author did himself no favor in establishing credibility with such gaffes as presented above.

So to sum everything up: a fascinating and enjoyable narrative on a very interesting time in Western history, but one must be careful to take what the author says with a grain of salt, unless corroborating evidence is provided.

The main problem with this book is the title and the intended focus. There's a lot of history on the Emperors and the Roman Empire after the Julio-Claudian dynasty (basically, after Nero). In this respect the book is successful, although nothing out of the ordinary in terms of style. The ascension of Vespasian and Titus and the reign of Domitian are covered with decent detail.

The problem is that through all those years, the author tries to "guess" what was Hadrian doing. There are so many "we can only guess", "the most probable", "it's infuriating the lack of sources", etc, that one wonders why the author think he is focusing on Hadrian and not on the period itself. Granted, there's a (little) more detail on the life and government of Hadrian compared to the other emperors, but it doesn't justify a biography.

I picked the book to read about Hadrian and his time. Instead, I got a lot of "his time" but not so much on the man himself. Maybe that's why there aren't many biographies of Hadrian, the lack of sources makes it almost impossible, and Everitt's effort is not the exception.

Having read and enjoyed Everitt's previous biography of Cicero I quickly picked up a copy of his latest biography of Hadrian. I am in agreement with the other reviewers that this is a "life and times" biography and covers alot more than just the life of Hadrian (and in many ways this is welcome). The book covers in varying amounts of detail the period from the end of the reign of Nero (68 AD) to just after Hadrian's death (138 AD) with an obvious emphasis on the life and reign of Hadrian.

As with all Roman figures, Everitt must rely almost entirely on the near contemporary secondary accounts of Roman historians. This means that many of the details are somewhat speculative and Everitt for the most part does a good job of navigating the reader through the available written accounts and relevant scholarly evidence. Everitt also weaves in a large amount of general political, cultural, and historical information regarding the Romans of the period and throws in enough interesting details to keep the reader already familiar with Roman history engaged.

All in all I think most readers with an interest in the subject and period of history will enjoy this book, although the more advanced reader may find it a bit lacking in in depth analysis. I personally did not enjoy this book as much as "Cicero" and Everitt is never fully successful at weaving biography and general history as he was previously. That said, "Hadrian" is still a solid effot and recommended to the casual reader of Roman history.

Before I discovered a passion for the history of the Roman Empire, I found myself drawn to Emperor Hadrian - what he accomplished, who he was, and the significant romantic notion of his worldy, artistic, monument-building approach to leading the Roman Empire.

Anthony Everitt's "Hadrian - and the Triumph of Rome" blends a fairly limited set of contemporary and near-contemporary resources with wonderfully portrayed color commentary of the times in which Hadrian lived.

In a recent visit to Rome and Italy, you couldn't swing the proverbial Roman stray cat without hitting an architectural ghost of one of Rome's most heard of, yet least-known Emperors. My wife is a U.S. history buff and teaches it to gifted students in 6th grade. She and her students are immersed in American history's greatest characters, but while poking fun at all of the Hadrian-ness we bumped into, she couldn't get her arms around his breadth of character. The only comparisons I could make were to early American Reneissance men like Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson.

Everitt points at Hadrian's two most lasting contributions to history. First, he stopped the expansion of the Empire that his adopted father, Emperor Trajan had pushed to the greatest limits the Empire had known. Not only did he halt expansion, he actually contracted the Empire. To demarcate that which was governed by Hadrian, he built walls. He built miles and miles of walls, of stone, of dirt, and of wood; creating physical barriers between the Empire's governed, and the ungoverned barbarian frontiers. Of course, the most lasting barrier is Hadrian's Wall in northern UK.

The second major theme of his 21-year term was a very sincere devotion to the arts - specifically anything relating to ancient Hellenist culture. In laying the groundwork for the society in which Hadrian grew up, Everitt points to Emperor Nero. While generally reviled as a murderer, who decimated the Senate, and had been widely accused of burning down his own city, Nero was a great philhellene, who opened a gateway in ancient Rome, into Greece. Within the creative and artistic communities, Nero was actually celebrated as he aspired to be a poet, musician and performer. And so Hadrian followed suit, although he was a much more grounded and savvy politician as well as a more genuine (and realistic) artiste.

Hadrian was born in southern Spain. Not much detail is known about Hadrian's youth, but his family was connected to the family of Trajan. When Hadrian's father died, Trajan took him along his own meteoric rise to the top of the Roman political structure. Hadrian's adoption is not clear cut. There's some evidence (or rather lack of evidence) to indicate with any assuredness that Trajan had specifically pronounced Hadrian as his heir.

Everitt's biggest success in "Hadrian" is his portrayal of life in the 2nd century AD. His writing is crisp, and his subject is thoroughly researched. The book's strength lies not in its narrative (which, to be fair, is difficult considering the dearth of resources on Hadrian), but on its breadth and scope that paints Hadrian very colorfully in his cultural context.

"Hadrian" is Anthony Everitt's third book regarding perspectives on the history of Rome. "Cicero" focused on the decline of the Republic and the establishment of Empire. "Augustus" brought us a view of the Empire as it grew and spread its dominance. Hadrian brings us the height of the Empire just before its decline. Everitt continues to be an engaging writer with a rather positive portrayal of all three of his subjects. His is not a history of judgment but rather a history of understanding. Certainly, he does not present history as if we should impose current ethical and moral standards. He does provide explanations as to why humanity thought and acted in the manner in which it did at that time.

I highly recommend all three of his books. I also heartily recommend "Caesar" and "How Rome Fell" by Adrian Goldsworthy. While Goldsworthy presents a different, more academic approach, he nevertheless is an excellent complement to Everitt.